Debian Weekly News - May 10th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 19th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Shortly before the release a discussion on the version number for sarge arose. In light of the
upcoming release of sarge, the debian-release list has
seen a flood of requests to update packages in sarge which the release team
are dealing with.

Sarge is frozen. Steve Langasek eventually announced the freeze of sarge. All updates need to be approved manually
and should go in via unstable if possible. He explained which changes are
still allowed to go into sarge and emphasised on only fixing critical bugs
without other changes. If everything goes well, we'll be ready to release at
the end of the month.

Debian Server in 3.1 Watts. Alex Perry installed Debian woody on a Peplink
Manga. This
unit combines an ARM based processor, two Ethernet interfaces, a four port
switch, USB 2.0 and a power draw of 3 Watts (including the AC adaptor). He
installed Debian on a 1 GB USB flash drive and explains step by step how
it went.

Second Project Leader Report. Branden Robinson wrote his second report in which he reported about the sarge release progress, about three
new ARM machines that have been added to the buildd network, upcoming hardware
upgrades, about Debian assets and hardware donations, an interview and travel
plans among other topics.

AMD64 Port Update. Jörg Jaspert announced that the AMD64 archive has been moved from Alioth to a dedicated server in order to
decrease the load and disk usage on the old host. The system uses a copy of
the Debian archive suite and has
special tools added to keep their unofficial sarge distribution in sync with
the Debian sarge distribution. CD images of the release will also be hosted
on cdimage.debian.org.

License Incompatibilities. Christian Hammers reported
about a problem with Quagga which is licensed under
the GNU GPL but is supposed
to be linked against NetSNMP. This poses a problem since NetSNMP depends on OpenSSL which is
not GPL compatible.

APT Migration Status. Florian Weimer reported
the status of the apt 0.6 migration into sid and maybe sarge. He has set up a public test suite so that interested
users can test the behaviour of apt 0.6 with different test data. Matt
Zimmerman added
that uploading a new version even into experimental is
non-trivial due to library dependencies.

Surveys in Debian. MJ Ray wrote
a summary that
describes recent surveys done with affiliation to the Debian project. It also
include some pointers to advice on producing good surveys. Andrew Suffield added
more cynical comments to it such as that surveys have to be treated with extreme
scepticism.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 2 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 219 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

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